dvd burners/drives.

[blaze15301]

so since i have been bulding computers i have had to buy a new cd drive every 6 months to a year or replace the cable like every 3. i know this cant be normal. i dont even really use a cd drive. but i still need it for installing to os and everything.

[SXRguyinMA]

something's not right. I've been using the same DVD burner now for over a year and a half. before this one (this one is SATA, last was IDE) I used that one for 3+ years, with the same IDE cable, with zero issues. check your motherboard maybe?

[nevermind1534]

The one I have has been in use for over five years. What brand do you have? My Samsungs and the 5 year old LiteOn seem to last ok.

[Konrad]

I'm still using 5 year old CD/DVD burners. The new ones just aren't better (can't go any faster or anything) ... I still have "junk" drives that are even older, some from the late 80s, they work perfectly but are just too slow or incompatible with modern disc formats.

Disc drives should last forever, unless maybe they have awful power regulation or are forced to run hot for way too long. Or unless you burn hundreds of discs each week for years. They don't even need cleaning more than once every few years, and basically never need mechanical recalibration/alignment unless they get bounced around a lot.

Check your PSU voltages, backprobing them *at the drives* while operating under load.

Check your cooling, are the drives cooking all the time?

Check your media; are your brands of discs listed as incompatible by the drive manufacturer?

Check your cables, are they damaged? Are any of the pins or ribbon wires broken or shorted? Also check the connectors on your drive and motherboard.

Benchmark another (known to be good) drive in your system and see how it compares. Any errors? Excessive heat? You may have some kind of weird motherboard fault, I suppose.

[blaze15301]

well the funny thing is ive gone threw 4 diffrent board and 6 diffrrent cd drives. lg,samsung,liteon,hp. and every time it is the same thing. ive changed my power supply twice now.

[SXRguyinMA]

are you using the right type of media with your drive(s)? what is happening to make you think you need to replace the drive?

[Konrad]

If there's no constant in the hardware then there might be something wrong in the software. Bad OS, drivers, or apps.

Have you checked your PSU and drive cables yet? It only takes one broken gear to wreck the whole machine.

Or you're just doing something weird. I think I've only seen three optical drive failures (out of literally hundreds of these drives in multiple computers) over the last decade. It's so rare that I usually assume something else must be the problem. I've seen numerous problems involving "dirty heads" and even more numerous problems involving crapped software.

[blaze15301]

well it happen like this. i was switching from my 790x to my new udp5 890fx board and i was getting some weird errors like a bluescreen and stuff. so i didnt feel like fiddling with the drivers and coming over everythign to make sure i got them all. i figured id just re do windows. its kept giving bsod and saying hardware failure a cd drive or hardrive is bad. so i un plugged every hardrive and it still have me the erros. i switched cd drives and it worked fine. i use magic iso to burn dvds that's relay the only thing i use any more. i noticed it before because it wouldn't load my windows disk and i know the cd worked right. im guessing the drive died then it killed the cable or something.

[Konrad]

Salvage your data, wipe the drive, clean install the OS. Let it autohappy all the drivers it can, then manually install the rest (chipset, video, everything else in about that order).

Working OS and drivers are as important as any other part of the machine.

[blaze15301]

lol i have already did that.